But Dr. Morando Soffritti, a cancer researcher in Bologna, Italy, makes a pretty compelling case that the sweetener is a possible carcinogen. From the New York Times:

The research found that the sweetener was associated with unusually high rates of lymphomas, leukemias and other cancers in rats that had been given doses of it starting at what would be equivalent to four to five 20-ounce bottles of diet soda a day for a 150-pound person. The study, which involved 1,900 laboratory rats and cost $1 million, was conducted at the European Ramazzini Foundation of Oncology and Environmental Sciences, a nonprofit organization that studies cancer-causing substances; Dr. Soffritti is its scientific director.

Of course, you force lab rats to consume gallons of any substance and — surprise! — they end up sick. One might argue no one in their right mind consumes that amount of Diet Coke … but, then again, maybe you haven’t met some of my friends.

This is an interesting line of research, and if aspartame is truly bad, I don’t want it in foods I or my kids consume. But this kind of thing can be a red herring when it comes to personal health. Worry less about Diet Coke, and more about artery-clogging foods. Most of us will die from cancer or heart disease. (See top causes of death.)Avoiding aspartame won’t change that.

7 Responses

I was diagnosed with a siezure disorder (epilepsy) when I was 20. It was rough going the first couple of years but I was finally put on a medication that seemed to work well. My only problem was that I was still given to all to frequent bouts of difficulty in concentrating; it was hard to focus. I read an article one day that said aspartame had been shown in a clinical trial to lower a persons siezure threshold. I took that to heart and stopped putting equal in my coffee every day. Whether it’s a placebo type effect or not, my difficulty in concentrating vanished virtually overnight and I now avoid aspartame like the plague.

Thanks for writing, John. Your story is very interesting — and brings up that very important phenomenon, the placebo effect. I wrote a story a few years back in which veterans received “placebo” knee surgery. Some of them were so pleased with the results, they asked to have it done on the other knee! Placebo medicine hasn’t been used to the extent it should be.

I don’t mean to make light of a serious medical subject (ok, yes I do — but not out of malice), but one of the reasons placebo medicine hasn’t been used all that much is because doctors don’t want to charge placebo-level bills — and if patients found out they were paying full rate for placebo medicine, the lawyers would have a field day!

All I can really say is that I cannot consume products with aspartame. I drink even a quarter of a can of diet coke, and I have a killer migraine forming. It’s quite frustrating and has resulted in my becoming positively paranoid about reading labels. Did you know that even non-sugar-free gum has aspartame in it?

Outside of anything else it may cause, that’s enough to keep me away from it.

One must also remember that what causes cancer in rodent models does not always hold true for human or primate models and vice versa. What is needed now are epidemiological studies that try to compensate for other risk factors (not easy to do) to see if aspertame has a similar effect in humans as well as more rodent studies to make sure that the data is valid and not skewed by some quirk of the study design. Aspartame should not be used in cooked or baked goods because it is thermally unstable and one of the breakdown components is either a known or suspected carcinogen, I forget which. It is concievable that some other mechanism may cause a similar breakdown in the body.